To say that we are living in a golden age of culture in North Texas is hardly surprising anymore. Although our wealthier citizens still trek to New York, London and Paris for a culture fix, they have less and less reason to do so.

Dallas Morning News art critic Rick Brettell

In the last two weeks, four exhibitions have opened — two each in Dallas and Fort Worth — which deserve serious reviews in The New York Times. Yet three of them are not even going to New York. How does the overworked art critic keep up?

The answer is not to write lengthy reviews of each exhibition, but to announce them in a "gatherum" of the fall season. Monet and contemporary photography in Fort Worth, ancient Egyptian cats and modern Spanish painting and sculpture in Dallas — four exhibitions so varied that it is pointless to compare them because they are too diverse to readily evaluate against one another. Thus, one needs to see all four to be "with it" in North Texas.

Monet at the Kimbell

Claude Monet's On The Bank Of The Seine, Bennecourt, from 1868, is currently on loan to the Kimbell in Fort Worth from the Art Institute of Chicago for an exhibit called, "Monet: The Early Years." (Kimbell Art Museum)

The most conventionally important and beautiful of the four is surely the Kimbell Art Museum's survey of the first decade-and-a-half of the career of Claude Monet — the first such exhibition ever mounted. From one of his earliest known paintings of 1858 to the masterpiece of sailboats on the Seine painted on a summer day in 1872, this exhibition, "Monet: The Early Years," is masterfully curated by the Kimbell's deputy director, Dr. George Shackelford, one of the world's authorities on impressionism.

Shackelford has persuaded the most stubborn of museums and the most private of private collectors to part with their works and has, after two years of arm-twisting and sweet-talking, put together a superlative group of 56 paintings, many of which have never before been seen in Texas and some of which have not been included in any Monet exhibition in decades (or ever).

Monet's A Hut at Sainte Adresse from 1867. (Kimbell Art Museum)

The result is simply stunning in its confidence and painterly élan. Monet was ambitious in every area of his painting, from landscapes to portraits and still lifes. He paints a summer melon at the peak of ripeness; a magpie sitting on a fence on a bright but cloudy winter day; a beautifully dressed woman lost in thought as she pauses in her reading; a deserted hut on the hill overlooking the English Channel; a bridge bombed by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War and mended in wood — and on and on and on.

The paintings vary in scale from inches to feet across, and the largest of them, once more than almost 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall, was cut into parts by the artist himself, unsure of his success at a scale never attempted by an impressionist. And it was painted outdoors with a trench dug in the earth so that the artist could work on the top sections without a ladder. There is really nothing not to like in this survey of a young artist's ambitions.

If sheer beauty and painterly boldness is not sufficient for an outing to Fort Worth, I advise combining your immersion into the youthful Monet with a tour of the blazing and courageous exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art called "Border Cantos."

In an election season that has brought unprecedented attention to the U.S.-Mexico border, the Amon Carter has had the courage to exhibit a group of large and hauntingly beautiful photographs of the border itself. In the absence of Donald Trump's wall, there are hundreds of miles of foreboding steel fence running through deserts, ranches, suburban towns and rivers to let us know that the billions we have already spent have resulted in something that might already approach the Great Wall of China.

The military look of this intrusion into innocent landscapes and humanscapes is so compelling that it gives anyone pause, and the stunningly beautiful photographs by Richard Misrach are paired with cantos, or songs, by Mexican composer Guillermo Galindo played on musical instruments made with the detritus left by immigrants as they cross the desert — shoes, backpacks, belts, clothes and sections of the wall itself that is torn apart to gain entrance to the U.S.

No matter your party of choice, this exhibition forces a reaction — not by preaching at us, but simply by showing us what there is at the border and by evoking the lives and the deaths of those who attempt to cross it. For every sailboat or sunny day in Monet's landscape world, there is an arid landscape or a forgotten backyard of haunting beauty at the Amon Carter.

For the love of cats

It is difficult for Dallas to rise to the aesthetic peaks the Fort Worth exhibitions ask us to climb. Our tasks are easier — and a bit more conventional — at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Meadows Museum, but no less worthy of attention. The DMA has harnessed the expertise and the sheer love of cats of its distinguished curator of antiquities, Dr. Anne Bromberg, to the extraordinarily rich and diverse permanent collection of Egyptian art in the Brooklyn Museum. The result — "Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt" — is a complete delight.

Several galleries in the DMA's capacious temporary exhibition hall are painted a pleasing ochre and filled with cats — wooden cats, bronze cats, painted cats, carved cats and stone cats. There are cats in every sense of the word: lions, domestic short-hairs, cat-headed deities and other feline creatures varying in scale from less than an inch to several feet.

The works are selected by the associate curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, Yekaterina Barbash, and are also the subject of a delightful — and wonderfully inexpensive — small book. Bromberg and the DMA's thoughtful exhibition designer take these ingredients and have given us an installation that seduces us to enter the arcane world of ancient Egyptian religion. There is much to learn from this dive into the ancient Near East, but it is made all the easier for those of us who are cat people.

Spanish art

(Juan Carlos QuindÃ³s de la Fuent)

A visit to the Meadows Museum to see what is called modern Spanish art seems much less formidable. But be prepared to be surprised and delighted, because what you will see is much more than what you bring to the exhibition. We all walk in with a sense of "been there, done that" bolstered by memories of the great Spaniards Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Juan Gris and Salvador Dalí, the giants of Spanish modern art known to us.

We do see works by these greats, whose careers were made largely in France, but they are presiding deities in an exhibition that features beautiful and carefully selected paintings and sculptures by artists whose names are unknown to us. Thereisan Eduardo Chillida sculpture (remember, we have a huge one in front of the Meyerson Symphony Center) and a couple of paintings by Antoni Tàpies, two names known to many who follow Spanish postwar art, but we have to read the labels to recognize them, so early and so unfamiliar they are.

Other artists are all but totally unknown, making a stroll through the exhibition a series of first-time encounters for even the most practiced of visitors to modern art exhibitions.

The works were chosen by an important Spanish historian of modern art from a collection of more than 1,000 works. The collection was formed by a group of corporations as the very first institutional collection of 20th-century modern art in Spain. The paintings are installed in five distinct sections, each with an explanatory label so that non-Spanish viewers can learn the true history of modernism in Spain.

Equipo 57, "Pa n 6
1950," oil on canvas (Meadows Museum)

In a century in which Spanish history has been divided not only by world wars but also by a lengthy political revolution and years of the anti-modernist dictator, Francisco Franco, modern artists were essentially forced to work in small, relatively isolated and private groups without the protection of an active art market and a national critical discourse.

Are these artists "great"? The answer is difficult to form and, in the end, it is too soon to tell. They are as interesting and as sincere as any from other European countries or from the Americas, and we learn to admire new figures in what has always been familiar terrain. This is as it should be from an exhibition in a distinguished university museum, whose aim is more to educate than to entertain.